CODEWITHSUNDEEP
vimauto-indent
James Anderson
James Anderson

Reputation:

Issue with smartindent in Vim

In vim with smartindent on:

  1. Press Enter after say an if-statement
  2. Type in {
  3. Press Enter twice
  4. Type in }
  5. If you hit ↑ and go to the previous line, indentation is removed from the blank line.

Even the vim documentation says that:

If you do not type anything on the new line except <BS> or CTRL-D and then type <Esc>, CTRL-O or <CR>, the indent is deleted again.

Is there any way to keep this indentation and not have it deleted?

Upvotes: 6

Views: 3188

Answers (4)

Chad Wellington
Chad Wellington

Reputation: 158

My preferred method is {<CR>}<esc>shift+o as it outpaces {<CR><CR>}<esc>k shift+s by several strokes. I get in a rut with it, though, and end up just using o or O to grab new, properly-indented lines off an empty when I should be using S.

That is, set up your bracing structure and open line-above:

if (true) {
}//cursor here, press shift-o

And you get the indenting you expect.

The open-above trick isn't any fewer keypresses than <up><end><cr>, but with escape remapped and shift being chorded, you can throw it in quite fast.

Also, don't forget your manual indent reset and block-movement. If you're inside a mangled curly brace block, simply use ={ (or =i{ if you're on top of one of the braces). I use that when I have a Good Idea that needs to see text asap, and I don't worry about any formatting frippery until I take a breather.

Upvotes: 1

ephemient
ephemient

Reputation: 204678

Use Shift+S to start editing on a blank line (from command mode, obviously). This will start your cursor off with the expected level of indentation.

Another doesn't-answer-the-question-as-asked-but-is-a-better-solution-overall:

When typing an opening brace in insert mode, this will insert a matching set of braces and leave the cursor on a new line in the middle.

:imap { {<CR>}<Esc>O

Similarly, this will auto-insert matching parens and square brackets.

:imap ( ()<Left>
:imap [ []<Left>

(Strip off the leading : when adding to vimrc.)

As I commented on Victor's answer, changing Vim's indentation behavior will leave "empty" lines containing extraneous spaces throughout your files. IMO, this is completely intolerable.

Upvotes: 8

Victor
Victor

Reputation: 5807

the article here talks about you're very same problem, and what to put in vimrc to fix it.

inoremap <CR> <CR><Space><BS>
nnoremap o o<Space><BS>
nnoremap O O<Space><BS>

I havn't exactly tested this tho.

also the same article links to a shorter alternate solution.

Upvotes: 1

Greg Hewgill
Greg Hewgill

Reputation: 992887

When this happens to me, I sometimes use ddko (or ddO) to delete the line without enough spaces and open a new line with the correct indent. Or, I'll just press A and then Tab enough times to get to the correct indent.

Upvotes: 2

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